" I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes ... to spread a lively terror ?"-Winston Churchill, writing as President of the Air Council, in 1919

"If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations?" Winston Churchill, in his Great Contemporaries, 1937

-----------------snippet----------His political career revealed no firm political principles or ideology. He shifted in his party affiliations from the Conservatives to the Liberals and back to the Conservatives. He praised Mussolini and Hitler lavishly after their totalitarian programs had been fully established and their operations were well known. He said that if he had been an Italian he would have been a Fascist, and as late as 1938 he stated that if England were ever in the same straits that Germany had been in 1933, he hoped that England would find "her Hitler." The eminent Anglo-American publicist, Francis Neilson, declared that Churchill's praise of Hitler was the most extreme tribute ever paid by a prominent Englishman to the head of a foreign state. When his "great and good friend" of former days, Mussolini, was murdered by Communist partisans and his corpse hung up head down in Milan, Churchill rushed in to a dinner party with the news, exclaiming: "Ah, the bloody beast is dead!" In World War II he declared that it was his great life purpose to destroy Hitler and National Socialism.

There is no convincing evidence whatever that Churchill ever proposed or supported any public measure with a primary interest in its probable effect on the welfare of Britain or humanity. He appeared to be exclusively concerned with its probable reaction on his own political career. In this he differed from Roosevelt. Even John T. Flynn admits that the latter, as a country squire, had a real sense of noblesse oblige and was interested in the well-being of the common people when helping them did not interfere with his own political ambitions. Churchill never revealed any sense of noblesse oblige. To him rank only demanded special privileges and rewards. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that he was the most vain person in the whole history of prominent public figures, a trait enduring until his death and after, when he had planned years or months in advance even the details of a pompous and dramatic public funeral.

It is well to remember that Churchill's great current reputation as a statesman rests entirely on events between April 1940 and July 1945. He was so thoroughly discredited as a politician by 1933 that both the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments considered that to have him in the Cabinet would be a detriment to Conservative prestige and prospects. When public issues returned again to domestic affairs in 1945, Churchill was resoundingly defeated in the General Election of that summer. As a wartime administrator he showed tremendous energy rather than organizing and directive genius. He was more distinguished for his pugnacity than for his statecraft, although there can be no doubt that he inspired the British to unite and continue the war against Hitler, but it may be questioned if unthinking resistance to Hitler after Dunkirk was the best policy for Britain. The most effective indictment of Churchill's wartime statecraft is that after gaining military victory he lost the peace to Soviet Russia.

There has been no greater fallacy than to regard Churchill as a military genius, although it is probable that no other important British leader has so loved war or worked harder to insure it when it seemed within the range of possibility. Churchill was responsible for the disastrous attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915, which was Britain's most spectacular defeat in the World War I (except for the futile attempts to break through the German trenches). It has been said that it was a good plan if it had worked, but a truly good military plan must work out in practice and not merely be impressive on paper. Both Lord Fisher and Lord Kitchener warned against the project. Churchill was compelled to resign as responsible for the failure.

Though he favored it for the Brits and Americans. His fulminations against Gandhi and defense of colonialism are legend.

As a military leader, he has to take responsibility for the disaster of Gallipoli in WWI and his failure to listen to the military when he insisted on the invasion of Norway, with the ensuing calamity at Narvik in the early days of WWII.

He also called for the crushing of the Irish rebellion, and hated unions.

He was, however, good at churning up nationalistic fervor. So was Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and Stalin. And, to a lesser extent, so is the current warmonger infesting the white house.

I am convinced Churchill was a great man and a true hero, yet I also know that had be been more powerful throughout his career he would be remembered more as war criminal than inspiration. Some events just call for a hard-ass but most don't.

It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

(India is) a godless land of snobs and bores.In a letter to his mother, 1896

I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place.Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937

(We must rally against) a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin.Quoted in the Boston Review, April/May 2001

"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives and most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre - horrid and inexorcisable.Writing in The World Crisis and the Aftermath, 1923-31

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.Churchill to Asquith, 1910

This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920

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